Hi Shep ! thanks for the link ..
what I mean is the starting screen .. instead of white on black .. the reverse would be kind to one's eyes when using terminal without X ..
It's macppc.NetBSD's choice ..

It looks like your NetBSD question is in the OpenBSD section. It may make a difference as to where you look for documentation.
I have not modified the console output other than the text display options. My understanding is that it emulates a VT100 terminal. There an extensive NetBSD guide with a section on the console drivers which I think addresses your questionhttp://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-cons.html
If you are using OpenBSD

Some are explained in link provided by Shep under "Changing the color of kernel messages". I believe OpenBSD has some similar options to tune.

__________________
The best way to learn UNIX is to play with it, and the harder you play, the more you learn.
If you play hard enough, you'll break something for sure, and having to fix a badly broken system is arguably the fastest way of all to learn. -Michael Lucas, AbsoluteBSD

When last I experimented with this (2007-8), the WS_DEFAULT_FG and _BG are source code options. You need to download the kernel source, and then set in the options in the SOURCE and then RECOMPILE the kernel and then reboot to that custom kernel.

We had a FIPS-compliant operation and we set the firewall and security hosts' _FG console color to a (very readable) light red font color. In this way in cases of admins with multiple remote login screens, the admins and their managers could easily distinguish at-a-glace the screens that were on (or left unattended on) production security hosts/appliances.

/S

__________________Never argue with an idiot. They will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Thanks for the points !
you mentioned one more reason why such a tweak is of value ..

(( for at least two reaons I must recompile the kernel : the color scheme and the OFB_ENABLE_CACHE option to quicken text scrolling .. I bet it is the same on both OpenBSD and NetBSD .. text scrolling sucks on both , when on apple hardware , with generic kernel ..))

Now this is odd. The link kindly pointed out by shep says you can change the console colours without recompiling the kernel by using the wsconsctl(8) utility (in NetBSD). But I tried it and it doesn't work on NetBSD.

First, doing#wsconsctl -a
doesn't show any of the required variables to exist:

All of these details can be changed either from kernel options or through the wsconsctl(8) utility; the later may be preferable if you don't want to compile your own kernel, as the default options in GENERIC are suitable to get this tip working.

What am I missing?

[I apologize if it was inappropriate to post this in the OpenBSD part of the forum, but these features were being discussed for both OSs.]

As I said, it has been a few years [and versions past], but given the limited nature of the OpenBSD console video driver/frame buffer, I'm pretty sure in OpenBSD it is recompile and go scenario.

That sounds very reasonable to me too, but the problem I mentioned is happening on NetBSD. I see my post was not at all clear about that because of the fact I only said it directly near the very end. So I'll edit it now to put that information at the top. Sorry about the confusion!